In the first centuries following the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah and the inauguration of the new covenant under which the people of God became a trans-national people crossing all borders, the church had few choices in the matter of her relationship to the surrounding culture. The options were limited due to persecution. As the church gained in numbers and influence, however, the situation began to change.
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The organized church is torn with strife and distrust. Ultimately, the battle is not so much between conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and activists, or fundamentalists and modernists. The issue now is between belief and unbelief: Is Christianity true or false, real or unreal?
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Openness to truth where truth may be found is a long-standing virtue that worked on the assumption that there is such a thing as objective truth, to which we should be open. Students of higher education now taught one overarching virtue: to be “open.” The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue—an openness, a relativism that eschews any form of fixed objective values or truth. Its simplistic creed is that there are no absolutes.
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How do you know the Bible is true?
That’s an excellent question because so much is at stake in the Christian faith in terms of the truthfulness of Scripture. The Bible is our primary source of information about Jesus and about all of those things we embrace as elements of our faith.Of course, if the Bible isn’t true, then professing Christians are in serious trouble.
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At Ligonier, we know that your work in the church is crucial to advancing God’s work in this world. Godly leaders are on the frontline of ministry. Your responsibilities to clearly and effectively teach the gospel, lead the next generation, shepherd families, engage in missions and church planting, and serve wherever God directs you are profound.
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One of the most interesting stories ever published was a novella called The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility by Morgan Robertson. Robertson tells the story of the sinking of a large luxury liner named the Titan. The Titan in Robertson’s book was the largest ship in existence at the time: over eight hundred feet in length with a passenger and crew capacity of three thousand. It had numerous watertight bulkheads and was considered unsinkable. It carried the minimum number of lifeboats required by law, but far short of the number needed for three thousand people. While carrying many wealthy passengers across the North Atlantic on a cold April night, the Titan struck an iceberg at 24 knots just before midnight about ninety-five miles south of Greenland. The iceberg tore a gash in the ship’s starboard side, which flooded the watertight compartments. The unsinkable ship sank. Because the Titan did not have enough lifeboats, more than half of her passengers died in the icy waters.
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Many of us are satisfied with echoing Christian jargon and subsisting on a spiritual diet of milk instead of growing spiritually. Strong growth requires a healthy diet. It requires what the apostle Paul called “meat.” We need the discipline of study, the discipline of prayer, the discipline of service.
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There are hundreds of books on the Reformation, but if one coming to the subject for the first time were looking for the best place to start, he would be hard pressed to find a better introduction than Stephen J. Nichols’ The Reformation(Crossway, 2007). For those who find history difficult, Nichols’ style of writing is a breath of fresh air. He does not fill page after page with dry lists of names and dates. Instead, his gift is the ability to draw readers into the lives of the people about whom he writes, allowing us to see these great historical figures, warts and all.
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In the modern era, beauty is unavoidably tied to the simplistic concept of “prettiness,” like that found in greeting card poems or velvet paintings of lighthouses. In truth, beauty is far more. Beauty reveals the gamut of human experience. True beauty is an ally of the gospel in that it parallels the human dilemma. In reality, a rose is beautiful, but it also has thorns. When we investigate further, beauty reveals itself somewhere between the opposing forces of darkness and light, major and minor, protagonist and antagonist. Beauty can be appreciated often when seen in contrast with its counterpart — depravity. The honest painter, musician, or writer, gripped by the contrast between good and evil, is unafraid to portray both. In fact, the struggle between darkness and light is often the place artists do their finest work.
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